America votes, the world turns

Tuesday November 7, 2006, marks the beginning of an end and the
end of a beginning. A Democrat-controlled House of Representatives
and Senate mean the beginning of the end of the Bush Administration
and its unilateral, polarising style in foreign policy -
exemplified by the now departing Donald Rumsfeld at the
Pentagon.

More importantly, it marks the end of the beginning of a long
struggle for which we do not yet have a generally accepted name.
From now on, given the result of these mid-term elections, the mess
that the United States faces in the Middle East, the scale of
global challenges such as climate change and the rise of other
great powers, American foreign policy will have to be more
bipartisan at home and more multilateral abroad.

Five years after 1945, following a period of trial and error,
the government of the United States produced a seminal national
security memorandum, NSC-68, that set the course for a generally
bipartisan American strategy in what we came to call the Cold
War.

Five years after September 11, 2001, the US does not yet have
such a consensus - but its possible outlines may be found in the
final paper of a programmatically bipartisan project on US national
security based at the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton
University.

With an idealism of which Wilson would have approved, the paper
is entitled Forging a World of Liberty under Law - and its
emphasis on the importance of law, both inside states and between
them, presents a sharp contrast to the Bush Administration's war on
terror a la Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The international liberal
order that this bipartisan group advocates would be founded on what
the second president of the United States, John Adams, memorably
called the "government of laws not of men". Attempting to combine
Wilsonian idealism with Kissingerite realism, it takes on board
many of the criticisms that have been made by lower-case democrats
outside the United States and upper-case Democrats inside the US
over the past five years.

Yet it is distinctly harder-edged than the position of many
left-wing Democrats and democrats. The results of these elections
suggest that is where many American voters want their government to
be. The Democrats only did so well by fielding many centrist
candidates talking tough on national security.

The Princeton paper argues that the three strategic priorities
of American policy should be a secure homeland, a healthy global
economy, and "a benign international environment, grounded in
security co-operation among nations and the spread of liberal
democracy". Liberty and law both need to be backed up ultimately by
the use of force, so it suggests a "global counterinsurgency"
strategy against global terror networks and tough measures against
nuclear proliferation. It argues, however, that rather than
overrelying on the single instrument of military force - perhaps
the biggest error of the past five years - American policy should
be multidimensional, "operating like a Swiss army knife, able to
deploy different tools for different situations on a moment's
notice".

The new strategy should fuse hard power and soft power, be
grounded in hope rather than fear, focused as much on what happens
inside countries as between them, and adapted to the information
age of 24/7 instant communication. Its three central goals should
be pursued through what it calls a Concert of Democracies, for
which the authors even draft a possible charter. Major democratic
powers such as India, Japan, Brazil, Germany and two unspecified
African states should become permanent members of the UN Security
Council, though without a veto.

It would be naive to suppose that this paper is going to become
the basis of a new consensual strategy. There will be plenty more
American politics around foreign policy between now and then. While
George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in the White House, the
rhetoric and the policy will change only so much - even with
Rumsfeld's long overdue departure. A pre-emptive bombing campaign
against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities remains a possibility.
Moreover, Democrats in power could lurch towards political
isolationism and, more particularly, economic protectionism. But
the Princeton paper indicates the areas in which a bipartisan
strategic consensus might be found, while these mid-term elections
suggest that many Americans would welcome it. The United States may
still be "two nations" on issues such as abortion and gay marriage,
but red and blue are mixing on foreign policy.

What is more, this is an approach to which many fierce critics
of the Bush Administration in other democracies around the world
could subscribe. Apart from the fact that it inexplicably omits
climate change from its conspectus of "major threats and
challenges", I think it's a very impressive attempt. But there
remains a big question about how this strategy for a "benign
international environment" and a Concert of Democracies is to be
arrived at. Somewhere underneath the Princeton paper there is a
sense that the United States should lay out a strategy for what
used to be called the free world, as it did in the early years of
the Cold War. Where it leads, others will follow.

Yet the Princeton project's own analysis shows just how much
more complex and multipolar the world of 2006 is than that of 1950,
and how much more limited is the United States' ability to set the
agenda on its own. If that is true, it follows that other
democracies (and democrats in less free countries) should be
involved in designing the strategy, not mere recipients of it. The
report concludes with an insistence that the US should do more and
better "gardening" among its allies but it may be worth recalling
that the rest of us are not plants.

As it happens, the two years of divided government in
Washington, leading up to the next presidential election, will also
be years of leadership change in other major democracies. To secure
liberty under law, the United States needs to change not just its
own strategy but the way it arrives at that strategy. The world's
second largest democracy has spoken, but a Concert of Democracies
can only be made by a concert of democracies.

Timothy Garton Ash is author of Free World : America,
Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West.

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